Enter Your Reply The Comment You're Replying To H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Sep 19, 2008 08:51 AM UTC:This might be a good place to point out that the Mao, Moa and Moo do not exhaust the possibilities of lame Knight moves. They are the only possibilities as you lay out the Knight's leap on the board as an orthogonal + diagonal step (in either order). But there are other paths that lead to a (1,2) leap as well. Super Chess, for instance, makes use in some pieces (Archer, Ambassador) of a three-step Knight move, reaching (1,2) through the unique path (0,1)-(1,1)-(1,2) (i.e. a zig-zag path of orthogonal steps, first and last one in the same direction, and the middle one perpendicular to that). The rationalization in Super Chess is that an Archer needs a clear line of fire, and thus both 'intervening' squares must be empty. This introduces an even larger degree of lameness to the moves, which can now be blocked on two squares. (Note that a path (1,1)-(0,1)-(1,2) effectively would be the same.) Other posibilities would be to lay out the path as (1,0)-(1,1)-(1,2) or (0,1)-(0,2)-(1,2), the L-shaped moves. These would also be 'double lame'. In practice lameness is a very strong handicap, especially in a piece like Mao, where two moves in different directions can be blocked on a single square, due to overlapping paths. A Mao in normal Chess would be worth only half a Knight , almost exactly. With doubly lame moves almost no value would remain, unless the lameness is partly ameliorated by mking the piece multi-path, like the Moo. If we would combine the two L-shaped and the zig-zag doubly-lame move in a multi-path piece, it would have exactly the same degree of lameness (topologically equivalent) as George Duke's Falcon! Edit Form You may not post a new comment, because ItemID Multiform does not match any item.